3 Ways To Drive Results With Content Marketing

Content marketing gives you an opportunity to connect with your potential customers in a way that is different from other marketing techniques. While other forms of marketing are good for gaining awareness and building your brand’s image, content marketing works to build a deeper connection.

When properly utilizing content marketing, you’ll be able to drive results by building a personal relationship with your potential customers and giving them an opportunity to engage with you.

Make Sure Your Content is Easy to Find

The first step to a successful content marketing strategy is ensuring that your content will be easy to find for your target audience. There are many ways to accomplish this, but one of the most successful ways is through SEO.

Search Engine Optimization is a method that utilizes a deep knowledge and understanding of how the major search engines (think Google) work, and effectively work within that framework to rank well. For example, one way Google decides if a page is relevant is by how authoritative a website appears to be on that particular subject. There are many ways to be an authority in Google’s eyes from having a lot of external links to your page to being a recognizable source of information on one particular subject by providing a significant amount of content on the subject.

Regardless of what your plan is, the main point here is that you need to have a strategy for targeting your audience and making sure they can easily find your content before you even start the creation process.

Create Content that is Relevant, Engaging, & Timely

Of course, if your content isn’t any good it won’t matter how many times it is presented to your target audience. There are three things we think about when we’re asking ourselves: “is this any good?” The first qualifier is relevancy. A piece on cat furniture is not relevant to a person who only owns dogs and isn’t in the market for cat furniture. Therefore a piece on cat furniture on a dog blog wouldn’t be relevant. If the piece was on something like “the best furniture for your pup” then it would be relevant to your customer.

The second qualifier for quality content is that it needs to be engaging. Let’s say you’re writing for the dog blog and you want to discuss the difference between dog food brands. While this may not seem like an engaging topic, it can be if written the right way. Perhaps you bring a bit of fun into the piece by creating relatable characters that your audience will enjoy. You’re still talking about dog food, but your audience will stay with you through the end of the piece.

And the third qualifier is timeliness. Let’s say the dog blog is part of your content marketing strategy as a dog food supplier. If you present the piece on dog food brands right after your customer has just checked out, it’s no longer relevant. That piece would be better presented through a newsletter or on a blog where your customer can see it before they buy. A timelier article for right after a sale might be on “best products for cleaning up after your pup.”

Use a Compelling Call to Action

The third step to driving results with your content marketing comes in at the very last moment. In fact, this is the only opportunity for your customer to engage. While the content you’ve provided was easy to find, relevant to your audience, engaging and interesting, and of course timely, it still has to serve its purpose. That’s why you’ll want to use a compelling call to action to let your reader know where to go next.

A compelling call to action might be something like this:

If you’re looking to learn more about how you can drive results with content marketing, check out our FREE ebook “Content Marketing E-Book” now.

In this call to action, we’ve done two things. First, we told you what you’ll gain from moving to the next step: you’ll learn how to drive results with content marketing. Second, we told you how to get that result: check out our FREE ebook.

And now that you know where to get more information, you can go ahead and see how you can use content marketing to drive results for your business in our ebook. See what we did there?